Many of the truckies we interview here at Deals on Wheels can trace their connection to the transport industry back two or even three generations — but few go back as far as 1857.
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That’s when Royston Whybird’s great-grandfather John first arrived in Ipswich, where he operated as a drayman until 1905.
“He was moving anything that needed to be moved, whether that was a bag of flour, a bale of wool for the woollen mills, or a load of furniture for someone who wanted to shift house,’ Royston says.
“I still have a daybook, so you can see a list of what he used to do, like moving furniture for two shillings.
“Of course, they didn’t have trucks when my great-grandfather started out — they didn’t have any motor vehicles at all.
“To give you some perspective — my great-grandfather was working as a drayman for three years before the Burke and Wills Expedition.”
In 1905, it was time for Royston’s grandfather Henry to take over the business, and in 1911 he bought a “lorry” — but it wasn’t what British people today would call a lorry!
“A lorry was a road vehicle that had two axles and two horses, but it was sprung for use on the road.
“A lot of people might think of it as a wagon but what my grandfather had wasn’t a wagon, because that is a farm vehicle that’s got no springs.
“When they first made trucks, they would call them motor lorries, but my grandfather had a horse-drawn lorry.”
When motor-drawn lorries eventually came on the market, Henry was too “pig-headed” to buy one.
“He said he was too old to learn to drive a truck, so he was way behind the times,” Royston says.
“He was still using horses during World War 2.”
Royston’s father Allan took over the business in 1946, after a stint in Borneo with the Australian army.
“When World War 2 ended, my father came home and he used the horse and lorry until he could get a loan from the military for a deposit, at a cheaper interest rate.
“Then he bought a 1946 Ford truck.”
Allan continued his grandfather and father’s legacy of running general freight – especially furniture.
Then in 1953, he built himself a furniture van, or pantechnicon, with a wooden frame and galvanised iron sheeting.
Royston himself – who was born the day the Japanese first bombed Darwin, and is now 82 years old – trained up as a motor mechanic before he started working for his dad in 1963.
“My parents found it very difficult to get me to go to school,” he remembers. “I’d rather be riding around on the trucks.”
Royston took over Whybirds Removals and Storage in 1987, with his daughter Sheree joining him in 1990 – the fifth generation to work full-time in the family business.
His years at the helm of the business brought some challenges, but also many highlights.
“We got to meet a lot of interesting people, and do some interesting removals,” he says.
“When Bill Hayden retired as Governor-General, he relocated back to the Ipswich area.
“We moved him from Yarralumba in Canberra and Sydney Harbour back to his property at Wivenhoe Dam.”
In 1997, Royston decided to sell Whybirds Removals and Storage, after it had been in the family for 140 years.
After that, he trained to become an auditor for compliance programs, visiting different transport companies across Queensland.
He was one of the first people in the state to present fatigue management to truck drivers, as well as implementing the TruckSafe risk management system soon after it was created.
He found the work engaging, and less stressful than the furniture removals business.
“We didn’t have 35 employees or 13 trucks to worry about anymore,” he says.
“My wife travelled with me and we went all over Queensland, wherever someone wanted us to go.
“It was just me, my wife, and a computer in our four-wheel drive, and that was a completely different situation to running a business.”
Being an auditor doesn’t always make you popular, he says.
“Sometimes people would see you as the bad guy, but I didn’t go in with the attitude of ‘I’m going to find something wrong here.’
“We were there to help them understand what they were supposed to be doing. If there’s a problem, you tell them where the problem is.
“We had a few difficult customers — some were straight up rogues. But the majority were just grateful that someone had come in to explain how it all worked.”
Royston retired in 2014, but still has a keen interest in the transport industry and preserving his family’s legacy.
After a long search, he tracked down the lorry that his grandfather had used, restoring it and bringing it around to vintage shows, pulled by Clydesdale horses.
He no longer does this, but he recently found a new way to honour his family’s ties to transport.
He has made a series of models demonstrating the Whybirds’ transition “from horses to horsepower”, from the horse and dray to the 1946 Ford.
The attention to detail in his creations is incredible, as is his resourcefulness when it came to the materials — with Royston using everything from old pieces of exhaust pipe for the lorry’s steel tyre, to his own leatherwork for the horse reins.
Royston even made the wheels in the same way that wheelwrights used to do it back in the day.
“I’d always thought I would like a model of grandfather’s lorry and I looked at all the model kits you could buy, but they were of a prairie wagon,” he says.
“So, I thought I’d better build myself one.”
He says his models are “not perfect” but he’s proud to have made something that future generations can look back on.
“I just wanted something that the family would always be able to look at and say, ‘That’s what great-grandad did.’”
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